Tag: hope

Not as the World Gives

The thing we are most afraid of is always what is within us.

Unsettling feelings about immoral and unethical conduct in a crisis (e.g. scammers, opportunistic leaders) may be addressed by resolving to do the caring thing. This can work its way into the soul (see previous post) to assure and encourage us about what is true and enduring.  Similarly, finding something of peace to focus on, beyond our self-preoccupations, might just quiet our deepest fear, that is, of what lies within us. It is what we suspect lies within us that we fear even more than exterior threats.

Jesus, in pledging his peace, said, “I do not give to you as the world gives” (John 14:27). Neither virus nor inner primordial fear will get the better of the person you are made to be and to be part of what God eternally has in mind for you.

Caring Will Endure

A crisis brings out the best and worst traits and behaviours. On one hand, we are warned of coronavirus-related scams. But we also see companies retooling to produce ventilators and personal protective equipment, and people making a point of showing appreciation for frontline workers. 

How will I conduct myself? has always been a question in time of testing, and may be just beneath our consciousness as we try to absorb the enormity and implications of the current crisis. We can fret internally over this, or focus on the everyday practical measures we keep hearing about–and need to–to help keep ourselves and others safe. If we believe love is at the heart of everything (see the beginning of John’s Gospel), then everyday caring is how we exercise that deep truth in a practical manner, and experience some peace and assurance in the doing.

The scammers and opportunistic leaders will have their day. It is caring that will endure.

Having Issues

A certain world leader recently referred to his own “great and unmatched wisdom.” You and I might speak of ourselves in such terms–in a tone of light self deprecation. He wasn’t joking.

Most of us would find his claim laughable or just plain pathetic. If we are ruthlessly honest, however, we might harbour self perception that is not dissimilar.

Maybe you have avoided obviously disruptive or destructive living. You figure you have it pretty much all together. So you don’t condescend, manipulate,dominate, move any or all conversation to your own person, bestow your ‘help’ and advice unbidden on others? You have, that is, no issues at all?

Truly impoverished are those if us who consider that only others “have issues.” We are then missing the true wonder of the humanity within us and of which we each are part. Such awareness and self discovery leads any of us with any consciousness to seek growth in our understanding and manner of relating to others and the world at large.

Consider: “We are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed” (1John 3:2).

Feeling inadequate, failed? God knows what fulfillment you are yet to know.

Feeling smug? You are missing something.

Beyond Our Imagining

Approaching Christmas, and the turn of the year, many of our thoughts go back, like, to a year ago. What were you thinking, hoping, dreaming then? You may find that they are the same things as now. The things you wanted to do, the things you wished were different, all that you wanted to change–maybe it’s the same. This time can be depressing for some. Maybe you’ve even gone through this cycle so often that you can’t imagine how things can ever be any better for you.

This is actually an opportune time to tap into a power that will help you imagine things differently, so differently that, instead of how things can ever get any better, what you can’t imagine is how great things will be.

Mary’s song (Luke 1:46-55) celebrates a God who has acted in the past, and will continue to act, to raise up the disenfranchised and downhearted. Mary–this is critical–can celebrate this God who has acted in and through her as both Lord of history and nature. That is, Mary is a key character in God’s acting in history at this specific time, and as Lord of nature in bringing about her remarkable pregnancy with this oh-so remarkable life in her. Most arguments about the existence of God focus on God as Creator, but Biblical faith celebrates God as Creator as an expression of experiencing him as sustainer and redeemer, a God who acts in a way that brings everything together: history, nature; it’s all one to him. In this way her song is, as is often pointed out, an echo of the Song of Moses and Miriam in Exodus 15, when God had acted in history and nature to deliver his people through the Red Sea.

The point is this: If God is experienced as sustainer and redeemer–as “re-creator” of life, bringing hope and new opportunity, it’s a no-brainer that he is also the creator in and behind it all.

This is the God who comes in Christ and through the power of the Holy Spirit into the very centre of our lives, at the intersection of our history and nature. The God of all power has acted in a personal way to make all possibilities open to you and me.

Your story matters. He wants to enter your life to give it new meaning and power and possibility, wherever you are in that story right now. You can’t imagine where that can lead.

Seeing Green

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Right now the way along this “greenbelt” isn’t terribly green. They say there is beauty in everything, but it’s a little hard to see it here – I guess unless you get right down and marvel at the movement of awaking bugs andvthe like. But I can, at least, see in it what is to be. In the next few weeks things will get greener and greener. Some people look at their path right now and find it looks drab and dismal; in fact they might not see a path at all, at least not to anywhere good. We need to pray for them to experience Easter, and that we might find the way to share it.